Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.0
Audio		5.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

Citadel Blu-ray Movie Review

Please, do fence me in.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 28, 2013

It’s particularly ironic, if also obviously intentional, that Citadel, a horror thriller about the debilitating effects of agoraphobia is one of the most claustrophobic films in recent memory. Set in a dystopian present that is oddly reminiscent of the future depicted in Dredd 3D, Citadel explores the tormented world of Tommy (Aneurin Barnard), a young Irish man who, in the film’s terrifying opening sequence, watches helplessly from a descending elevator as his very pregnant wife is viciously attacked by a bunch of hooded kids. By the time Tommy is able to extricate himself from the elevator and ascend several flights of stairs, his wife lies mortally wounded in the hall of their decrepit tenement building. She lapses into a coma, but a healthy baby girl is able to be delivered. Several months later, life support is withdrawn from the woman and she dies, leaving Tommy to fend even more by himself to bring up his infant daughter alone. The attack and its aftermath has left Tommy a walking bunch of neuroses, barely able to walk outside, and a poster child for “victim stance”, as is described at a support group he struggles valiantly to attend. In the meantime, Social Services are threatening to take his daughter, his only real reason for even trying to do anything, away from him. Citadel exists in a slightly surreal world that seems to be grounded in the grimy everyday reality of Glasgow and Dublin (where the film was shot) but which has at least one major unreal element: when we finally get a good look at the gang of kids who attacked Tommy’s wife and who end up kidnapping Tommy’s young daughter, they’re not simply “feral”, as the film’s press material describes, they’re almost quasi-zombies, with glazed over eyes and horribly disfigured faces. If that just slightly removes the film from a more ostensibly realistic feeling, it doesn’t dilute the almost palpable horror that Tommy experiences, and in fact may increase it.

The first two thirds of Citadel slowly but steadily builds its stifling ambience, with Tommy struggling to deal with his agoraphobia while at the same time remaining determined to keep his child safe—but from what? Is there really a threat, or has Tommy’s mind become addled by imagined terrors? Writer-director Ciaran Foy highlights Tommy’s isolation by keeping the character separate from virtually any other character, at least in the early going. This is particularly notable in an example where Tommy and his daughter are riding a dilapidated city bus that unexpectedly stops well short of Tommy’s destination with an announcement by a disembodied voice that due to safety concerns the bus line doesn’t go any further. Tommy is obviously distraught and in a panicked state begs the driver for more information, but Foy never lets us even see that there is a driver—it’s as if Tommy is talking (or screaming) to himself.

When Tommy does finally interact with other characters, things don’t always go swimmingly. While his relationship with Marie (Wunmi Mosaku), a nurse who cared for Tommy’s now late wife, is actually pretty healthy, at least by Tommy’s standards, he isn’t really able to fully invest in what is obviously Marie’s romantic interest in him, due to his increasing fears. Tommy’s interactions with a foul mouthed Priest (James Cosmo) are decidedly more problematic. The Priest, who officiates at the burial service for Tommy’s wife, first berates the young man for being such a wimp, and then almost chuckles when he tells Tommy that the people who killed his wife are obviously going to be coming back for his daughter as well.

The Priest is a bit more, well, Fatherly to a young blind boy named Danny (Jake Wilson) who is in his care, and in the film’s suffocating final act, the Priest, Danny and Tommy return to the tenement building where Tommy’s nightmares began and where he’s certain the gang of so-called feral children have taken his infant daughter. Citadel then becomes a kind of examination of how far one father is willing to go to overcome his fears. There’s a sort of relentless quality to this last act, and it’s undeniably gruesome in a couple of moments, anchored by Barnard’s quite viscerally effective performance which aptly depicts just how wounded Tommy is. But this is also when we finally get a (more or less) good look at the “feral” children, which is when Citadel indeed starts to mimic Dredd in a perhaps unexpected way, but introducing, whether intentionally or not, a science fiction element which seriously undercuts the otherwise horrific reality that Tommy is forced to face.

Citadel Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Citadel is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of New Video Group with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. Director Foy and cinematographer Tim Fleming have gone for an intentionally dark look throughout vast swaths of this film, which ups the anxiety quotient but often robs the image of fine detail, not to mention shadow detail. A lot of Citadel looks just plain murky, which is not to say that's not evocative. The film has also been color graded to a really sickly green or green-yellow tint in several key sequences, with other segments favoring a blue tint, two choices which again add a lot of mood but which tend to suck the fine detail out of the image. Things are decently clear in the few well lit exterior shots, but otherwise this high definition presentation is kind of muddy and ill defined quite a bit of the time.

Citadel Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Citadel's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 audio is superb in virtually every way, shape and form, full of spooky (if contextually irrelevant) sound effects and some really aggressive LFE that ably recreates Tommy's fear of things that go boom in the night. Fidelity is exceptional and dynamic range is extremely wide. Surround activity is very smartly and moodily placed throughout the film, especially in sequences where we're kind of "inside" Tommy's head as he reacts to the increasing horror of the feral children. The only niggling complaint some may have with this track is the really thick Irish accents of most of the principals which, when coupled with the absence of any subtitles, makes understanding some of the dialogue more than a bit of a challenge. Otherwise, though, this is a sterling track that is easily one of the most effective horror audio mixes in recent memory.

Citadel Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Behind the Scenes Making of Featurette (1080p; 19:07) is actually called Citadel: Inside the Fear and is a fairly interesting featurette which includes some fascinating, if disturbing, anecdotes from Foy's own background which inspired the film.


• Cast and Crew Interviews include:

  Director Ciarán Foy (1080p; 32:42). This repeats some snippets from the above featurette but goes into quite a bit of depth about Foy's intent in making the film.

  Anuerin Barnard (1080p; 10:45). The actor talks about his conception of the character of Tommy.

• Trailer (1080p; 2:07)

Citadel Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Citadel is undeniably effective quite a bit of the time, really smartly focusing on Tommy's debilitating fear rather than the outright shocks of consistent violence. There is some extremely gruesome violence in Citadel, mind you, but it only serves to comment on Tommy's state of mind. Where Citadel goes seriously off the rails is in its depiction of the so-called "feral" children, who, once we finally get something akin to a good look at them, seem awfully like genetic mutants or (heaven forfend) zombies. Otherwise, though, Citadel is quite well done and should certainly provide some requisite chills for those who like this sort of film. The video here is kind of middling, part of which may be intentional, but the audio is outstanding. Supplemental material isn't extremely copious, but what's here is quite interesting. Citadel comes Recommended.